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Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

newsweek.com

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Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#51

Post by sl1ck731 »

masonic wrote: post #22
sjg007 wrote: post #11

Adolescents are natural night owls. It's probably in our genetics.

It's probably in our genetics It's never been reported in pre-industrial societies or even presently in areas where artificial light well into the night is uncommon.

There have been quite a few studies popping up recently regarding this and there does appear to be genetic mutations that account for being a "night owl".

https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/the-genetics-of-be...

DSPD is also seen far more frequently in adolescents.

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#52

Post by cgriswald »

wrktanice wrote: post #48
barry-cotter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stayed up til the same time reading books for the same reason OP stayed up, not being tired. Teenagers have a delayed sleep cycle compared to adults, it’s not a matter of choice, it’s when your body says to wake up or sleep autonomously, same as my baby wakes at 5am and sleeps at 8pm, because that’s what his body is telling him to do.

Were you not tired because you didn't need sleep, or because your mind was being stimulated? It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.

Sleepiness in humans is driven by the number of hours they remain awake and by time of day, more or less independently. In teens sleep onset as a result of these are both delayed relative to children and adults.

Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#53

Post by wrktanice »

cgriswald wrote: post #52
wrktanice wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you not tired because you didn't need sleep, or because your mind was being stimulated? It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.

Sleepiness in humans is driven by the number of hours they remain awake and by time of day, more or less independently. In teens sleep onset as a result of these are both delayed relative to children and adults. Certainly there are cases where tired teens stay up because they are stimulated the same as happens in adults. But generally speaking, teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcra…

> teens don’t stay up because they are playing Starcraft. They play Starcraft because they are up.

This is, at least in my experience, completely untrue. When I play Starcraft, I'll easily play till 2-3 am before I start feeling tired. And I'd continue playing, but I'm literally succumbing to exhaustion at that point.

If I force myself to before that, say midnight, I start feeling tired almost immediately. And if I don't play at all, and don't substitute gaming with some equally stimulating activity, I can easily be tired and ready to sleep by 10 or 11 pm.

Not to mention, in addition to the mental stimulation, the impact of staring at bright blue light on natural melatonin production.

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#54

Post by pfranz »

wrktanice wrote: post #48
barry-cotter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stayed up til the same time reading books for the same reason OP stayed up, not being tired. Teenagers have a delayed sleep cycle compared to adults, it’s not a matter of choice, it’s when your body says to wake up or sleep autonomously, same as my baby wakes at 5am and sleeps at 8pm, because that’s what his body is telling him to do.

Were you not tired because you didn't need sleep, or because your mind was being stimulated? It's quite easy to not feel tired when you're stimulated, but it doesn't mean you don't need sleep.

I'm sure gaming and screen-time don't help, but it's fairly well known that younger people tend to stay up late and have difficulty waking up in the morning. In high school I never understood why they did certain things like offer AP classes only at 1st period or offer any "difficult" core classes 1st period (well, I knew it was convenient for them, but horrible for the average student). California just passed a law saying schools must start after 8am.

I remember hearing talk about a theory why younger people stay up late and older people get up early. It helped provide close to 24/7 monitoring of the village for danger.

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#55

Post by pfranz »

gruez wrote: post #19
sb057 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, if we moved school to 5 am, he would have simply only stayed up until 10 pm. Is that particularly realistic?

>By that logic, if we moved school to 5 am, he would have simply only stayed up until 10 pm. I believe that. >Is that particularly realistic? The only issue is that at 5am, there won't be daylight during the winter. Lack of daylight presents safety issues and makes it more difficult to wake up.

It's pretty well studied that most teenagers stay up late.

My freshman year of high school my school was under construction so I was bussed across town. Which meant I had to wake up close to 5am. I don't remember staying up especially late, but I was perpetually tired. Id sleep on the bus both ways.

In college I had a semester when I had a 5am class. I found it much easier to stay up all night and crash after than to wake up for class.

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/teens-and-sleep

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#56

Post by frankieta »

Lately I'm trying to avoid being a "night owl" because I think it's affecting my short but also long term memory. I can't often remember things that I deem simple, like, "who's the lead singer of a band that I love" or I can have a more than normal difficult to remember the name of a colleague.

Or maybe it's my brain developing some Alzheimer like disease.

I'm 36

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#57

Post by baron816 »

astura wrote: post #45

Kids need a more sleep than adults, sometimes a lot more sleep. I don't think adults realize this sometimes, and kids can silently suffer as a result (and not even really understand they are suffering). It absolutely amazes me when I see young children out and about late at night because I had a very strict early bedtime as a child - 8pm early in life, 9pm starting my tween years. It was very much to my disdain at th…

Falling asleep that early is unnatural and very difficult at that age. I recall many nights trying to go to sleep early and lying in bed, stressing about not being able to sleep (making it even harder to sleep).

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#58

Post by zeta0134 »

EpicEng wrote: post #7
MperorM wrote: post #3

Lack of sleep was definitely the cause of my terrible grades in highschool mathematics. I would stay up late (1-2 am) to play in starcraft tournaments, to have 8 am classes in mathematics. (There's a neat inverse correlation between my highschool grades and starcraft rank) It's crazy to me just how terrible school systems are at optimizing for learning. I would get terrible headaches from classrooms that had too many…

>We wake up students too early I agree, but... you were staying up until 1-2am playing video games. C'mon.

I also stayed up until 1-2am, regularly, starting around junior high. I performed a great many tasks, mostly teaching myself various programming languages, always at the relative expense of my concentration in the next day's classes. Two things were the primary motivating factors in developing this habit:

- My parents wouldn't leave me alone for very long in the evenings, so I felt like I wouldn't get a chance to really concentrate until they were off to bed - My brain gets tired around 10pm like a normal person, but then it gets a "second wind" and is up happily until 3-4am, with intensely increased clarity of focus.

The first trait was obviously correctable and probably circumstantial, but the second feels far more innate. I just focus better right after the sun goes down, and I'm not really sure why. It's like all the stress from the day melts away, and I get a chance to finally be myself for a few hours. So, I work an evening shift (my work day starts at noon and gets out quite late) and I couldn't be happier for it.

It's a shame that this combination is both common, and regarded as lazy by society at large, because it seems to be quite the opposite. I get my best work done in the evenings, and so do lots of other people. I wish that we were generally more accepting of these traits, because if I hadn't had the good fortune to stumble into a job with such a well-aligned shift, I would still be struggling to sleep properly most nights.

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#59

Post by arkadiytehgraet »

MperorM wrote: post #3

Lack of sleep was definitely the cause of my terrible grades in highschool mathematics. I would stay up late (1-2 am) to play in starcraft tournaments, to have 8 am classes in mathematics. (There's a neat inverse correlation between my highschool grades and starcraft rank) It's crazy to me just how terrible school systems are at optimizing for learning. I would get terrible headaches from classrooms that had too many…

I bet if you would study mathematics / do your homework instead of just playing SC, you would not have had bad grades.

Source: studied math till 2 AM, played some TF till 4 AM, had math classes at 9 AM in highschool. Did not have bad grades in math classes.

Re: Around 30 percent of children in the U.S. don't get enough sleep: study

#60

Post by watwut »

barry-cotter wrote: post #10
EpicEng wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We wake up students too early I agree, but... you were staying up until 1-2am playing video games. C'mon.

I stayed up til the same time reading books for the same reason OP stayed up, not being tired. Teenagers have a delayed sleep cycle compared to adults, it’s not a matter of choice, it’s when your body says to wake up or sleep autonomously, same as my baby wakes at 5am and sleeps at 8pm, because that’s what his body is telling him to do.

Babies dont wake up at 5 not go to sleep at 8. Their sleep can be highly irregular or regular, may be affected by light or not. And when it is affected by light, you can make the room dark in the morning.

Babies don't have a clock.

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